Monday, October 17, 2005

Three cool links and a rockstar

Cool Link #1:
Courtesy of the BBC, here are a bunch of audio interviews with various writers. Some of the interviewees included are Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, and Nadine Gordimer.
From the same source, and even cooler, a bunch of audio interviews with poets including Auden, Cummings, Heaney, Yeats. (Yeats!)
I haven't listened to any of these yet, but it looks awfully nifty.

Cool Link #2:
The UCLA Library's Dept. of Special Collections has mounted an exhibition of the papers & manuscripts of Paul Monette, including a very nice online exhibition. Some of the online images include working drafts of poems, as well as photographs and other stuff. I remember being utterly devastated by Love Alone: Elegies for Rog when it came out, hearing an urgency and, for lack of a better word, a necessity in these poems for which at the time I had no real comparison other than Plath's Ariel. In addition to the images, the online exhibition includes a lengthy biography of Monette and his work. (I had completely forgotten that he wrote an episode of thirtysomething, a show I adored at the time.)

Cool Link #3:
Okay, this has nothing to do with writing except that whales have inspired me a lot, but Cape Cod Online has an extensive feature on the highly-endangered North Atlantic right whale. Lots of pictures, multimedia, and information about these amazing creatures.

Rockstar:
Amy Ray (of the Indigo Girls, currently touring in support of her second solo album -- she'll be here in Bloomington on Saturday) sent out handwritten thank-you notes to those of us who volunteered to do "street team" publicity work -- putting up posters, phoning radio stations to request her songs. A very sweet gesture from someone whose music I love and whose integrity and political work I respect deeply. (She is such a goofball, though -- ending the note with "Happy Halloween and Rocktober!!!" Somebody, I think, was a wee bit punchy from the road. *grin*) Amy's solo work, incidentally, is just terrific; rougher and punkier than what she does with Indigo Girls, and good & loud, and uncompromisingly queer. I cannot WAIT for this concert on Saturday.

3 comments:

Ginger Heatter said...

Thanks for the link to poet interviews, Anne. How very cool!

Anne Haines said...

Ginger - glad you enjoyed!

Woody - I will most definitely have fun. I am going really really really early so I can get an excellent seat (hopefully front row). Yay! And I never noticed the identity thing. Hee. Wouldn't it be cool if changing one's identity were that easy? :)

Pris said...

I really like the Indigo Girls' music. Lucky you!

Over the years, the best five rock concerts I've seen, in order of preference..
Billy Joel (he gives all to an audience)
Rolling Stones Uncle Sam concert (seventies) Mick J wore an american flag cape and hat..we had fifth row seats.
Grateful Dead (they were never a fav group of mine, but they put on a woozer of a concert)
The New York Rock and Roll Ensemble (nobody's prob heard of them anymore, but heard them at the Filmore West in San Francisco when passing through. Barely any seats. Mostly a dance floor with strobe lights and old movies being flashed onto the walls. Fun!)
Ike and Tina Turner at the Newport Jazz Festival..seventies. It was pouring rain, but the crowd didn't move. At the time, nobody knew of Ike's abuse, but they put on a crowd thumping performance.

Thanks for the links, too!